At noon on a blistering August day 40 years ago millions of war-weary Japanese huddled around whatever radios they could salvage from the smouldering rubble of their bombed and blackened cities to listen to Emperor Hirohito announce Japan`s surrender to the United States and its allies.
It was the first time in Japan`s 2,000 years of recorded history that the Japanese people had ever heard the voice of their emperor–a man who like the 123 other emperors before him was considered a god and who therefore never spoke directly to his mortal subjects.
But Aug. 15, 1945, was different. And what the Japanese people had to be told could only come from ”Tenno Heika” (His Imperial Majesty).
The war, which for many Japanese had begun with Japan`s attack on China in 1937 and then escalated in 1941 with the attack on the United States` fleet at Pearl Harbor, was over. And for the first time in its history, Japan had lost and was about to be occupied by a foreign power.
The Japanese people, Hirohito`s thin and high-pitched voice intoned, must ”pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.
”The enemy,” Hirohito said, reading from an ”Imperial Rescript” that had been bitterly debated and delicately drafted by Japanese cabinet ministers following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Aug. 6 and 9, ”has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable.
”Unite your total strength to be devoted to the construction for the future,” Hirohito said. ”Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit and work with resolution so as ye may enhance the innnate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world.”
Today, 40 years after the emperor`s solemn words crackled over the airwaves, there are many who say that Japan has not only kept pace with the progress of the world but has become its new technological leader.
Indeed, some argue that in 1985, four decades after Japan suffered its shattering military defeat at the hands of the United States, it is well on the way to winning the longer and more significant economic war.
They point to America`s steadily climbing trade deficit with Japan
(predicted recently by former Undersecretary of Commerce Lionel Olmer to be heading for an unprecedented $50 billion in 1985) and of Japan`s increasing global dominance of such high-tech markets as robotics, fiber optics and advanced computers.
Japan is possibly the most studied and written about country in the world. Everything from its history to its management techniques have come under close scrutiny by the world`s scholars, business leaders and
journalists. Japan, the country that was once dismissed as a land of inscrutable imitators, has emerged as a nation of unequivocal innovators.
It wasn`t that way in 1945, when a defeated and frightened people sifted through the ashes of their horribly crippled country and watched the triumphant occupation forces of Gen. Douglas MacArthur march down cratered streets.
Indeed, on Aug. 15, 1945, the furthest thing from the minds of the Japanese was whether or not Japan would ever rival the United States as the world`s leading economic power.
For most Japanese the predominant motivation was survival, the prevailing emotion relief. For months they had watched helplessly as American B-29 bombers droned overhead dropping napalm-filled incendiary bombs on their largely wooden cities. Six months before, some 100,000 Japanese civilians had been killed when 300 B-29s fire-bombed Tokyo. In subsequent raids Tokyo, the world`s third largest city at the time, had been reduced to a wasteland of gutted concrete buildings and piles of charred rubble.
Other Japanese were confused, hurt, even angered by the words they had heard the emperor speak. It seemed incredible to a people long-infused with the traditions of Japan`s legendary samurai that the country`s leaders were giving up instead of fighting until the last man, woman and child were dead.
That appeared to be what was going to happen when American troops landed on Okinawa less than five months before. In three months of what has been described as the bloodiest fighting of the war, more than 110,000 Japanese soldiers and 150,000 civilians died on the tiny island located in Japan`s central Ryukyu chain. Of the 175,000 American troops who eventually landed on Okinawa, some 50,000 were killed or wounded. The war seemed destined to end in a crescendo of violence, with Japanese kamikaze (divine wind) pilots guiding their bomb-laden planes into one American ship after another. Of the 2,198 kamikaze pilots who died from the time of the first suicide attack on Oct. 25, 1944, off the coast of Leyte in the Philippines, 1,900 died in the battle of Okinawa.
From that experience American military experts determined that it would cost more than one million American lives to forcibly occupy Japan`s four main islands of Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu and Hokkaido.
But the emperor`s words changed all that. Instead of fighting to the death, the Japanese people politely welcomed the conquering Americans and in the process set the stage for an economic rebirth unparalleled in the history of the world.
At the same time, millions of Japanese soldiers packed their gear and prepared to leave their far-flung posts for a humiliating homecoming–the already forgotten men of a Japan eager to forget.
Few Japanese thought at the time that they would redeem themselves in the eyes of their nation by swapping the drab brown uniforms of the crushed Imperial Japanese Army for the dark-blue business suits of Japan, Inc. and bombing the American mainland with Sonys and Seikos. Indeed, in the autumn of 1945, Akio Morita, the co-founder of the Sony Corporation, which perhaps more than any other Japanese company has come to symbolize Japan`s postwar success and the resultant economic invasion of the American homeland, was a young naval officer and physicist who, along with partner Masaru Ibuka, was making ends meet by repairing war-damaged radios on the third floor of a burned and gutted department store in Tokyo`s Ginza commercial district.
Ichiro Hattori, whose grandfather founded the Seiko Co. in 1881, was a confused and frightened 13-year-old schoolboy who had watched his Tokyo house disappear in a pillar of flame during a B-29 raid three months earlier and then had spent part of the next morning sidestepping hundreds of charred bodies on his way to school in the city`s Harajuku district.
Yoshiko Miyatake was a 31-year-old war widow when the emperor took to the air waves. She had no radio in the sheet-metal lean-to in east Tokyo that she and her only child lived under, and she didn`t learn that Japan was surrendering until later that night. But for Yoshiko Miyatake Aug. 15 will not be remembered for what the emperor did or said. For her it will always be the day her 7-year-old daughter died in her arms, her frail body ravaged by fever and covered with napalm burns suffered in the city`s frequent fire bombings. Today Miyatake earns a living teaching Japanese flower arranging to the wives of American Air Force officers.
Zenshiro Hoshina, a 1931 graduate of Yale University, where he studied American history, who went on to become an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, was director of the Bureau of Naval Affairs when he and 23 other high-level officers were summoned to the imperial bunker on Aug. 14 to hear the emperor announce his decision to surrender. Today the 94-year-old Hoshina is the only living participant, other than the emperor himself, in Japan`s decision to surrender.
Forty years ago Akiyuki Nosaka was a 16-year-old high school student who had watched his younger sister die of malnutrition during the war and who spent much of his time stealing food in his hometown of Osaka in order to survive. Today Nosaka is one of Japan`s leading authors, often writing about Japan`s ”Yakeato-ha” (lost generation) in much the same way that his favorite American author Norman Mailer did in ”The Naked and the Dead.”
On Aug. 15, 1945, Shoichi Yokoi was unaware that Emperor Hirohito had gone on radio to tell the Japanese people to lay down their arms. Indeed, Yokoi, who was a 30-year-old sergeant serving with the Imperial Army on the island of Guam, would not lay down his arms for another 27 years until he was finally found and coaxed out of the jungles in 1972. Like 22 of his fellow stragglers who emerged from Asian jungles from the 1950s until 1975, Yokoi was a living reminder of Japan`s ”lost generation.”
Today, as Japan pauses to reflect on the 40th anniversary of her capitulation, these and millions of other Japanese find themselves examining the kind of economic superstate their reborn nation has become–and the price they have paid for it.
For many the symbols of Japan`s postwar success–the towering 50-story buildings in Tokyo`s West Shinjuku business district, the 43 million cars
(second in number only to those in the United States) that choke her highways and city streets, the soaring gross national product (approaching two-thirds of America`s), the department stores glutted with all the latest consumer items, the pollution and overcrowding in her urban centers, a pressure-cooker educational system that sometimes drives children who fail and their parents to suicide, the lamented erosion of traditions and virtues that are the essence of Japan`s ”Japaneseness,” the thousands of cast-off men and women who have been unable to adjust to Japan`s frenetic pace and its demands on the human psyche and who make their homes in cardboard boxes in Tokyo`s teeming railroad stations–are both the prizes and prices of life in the noncommunist world`s second richest country.
Of course, some things in Japan never change. In the middle of bustling Shinjuku, an old man pushing his ”jagaimo” (candied potato) cart seems oblivious to or at least unimpressed by the glass-and-steel pillars of progress towering above him. Pushed up next to Tokyo`s ubiquitous discos with their thumping bass drums and screeching guitars, women and men gather to experience the peace and serenity of ”chanoyu” (traditional tea ceremony). Not far from the Tokyo street where young Japanese punkers gather on Sundays to slam dance and display their orange and green hair, ”Kabuki,” one of Japan`s oldest stage arts, is performed to a full house.
And as was the case 40 years ago, few Japanese will know what Emperor Hirohito is thinking on the anniversary of his historic broadcast. The 84-year-old emperor is still confined by imperial tradition behind the gray stone walls of the sprawling and moated Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo. His movements are still carefully managed by the Imperial Household Agency, which since World War II has been unrelentingly vigilant in shielding the emperor from any activity that might be construed as ”political.”
